Chapter 8. Looking through the XenStore

The XenStore is a storage system shared between Xen guests. It is a simple hierarchical storage system, maintained by Domain 0 and accessed via a shared memory page and an event channel. Although the XenStore is fairly central to the operation of a Xen system, there are no hypercalls associated with it. The start info page contains the address of the shared memory page used to communicate with the store. A guest maps this page and then all further communication happens via the ring buffers in this page.

This chapter will explore the contents of the XenStore and the ways of interacting with it from userspace in existing systems and from a newly ported kernel. Unlike many other parts of Xen, the XenStore ...

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